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About
Adam Phillips, the foremost psychoanalytic writer of our time, plays with ideas about the lives we want.
The life you want: this concept is an ever-present but elusive one. It is the arena where the personal and the political overlap—and we find ourselves somewhat obsessed by this ideal. It's easy to be confused, confounded, and seduced by it.
The Life You Want presents Adam Phillips's agile mind engaging the questions surrounding the topic: How do we get the ideas we have? What do we do, and fail to do, about actually getting the lives we want? Is it possible to actually want (and enjoy) one's life, rather than merely enduring it—especially in a culture that insistently promotes this ideal and makes it difficult for so many people?
Slipping between sources literary and psychoanalytic and back again, Phillips, with his “mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers” (The Washington Post), guides us through an existential tangle packaged in the context of the current moment, to explore a perennial question.
Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Attention Seeking, On Wanting to Change, On Getting Better, and On Giving Up. He is also the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The life you want: this concept is an ever-present but elusive one. It is the arena where the personal and the political overlap—and we find ourselves somewhat obsessed by this ideal. It's easy to be confused, confounded, and seduced by it.
The Life You Want presents Adam Phillips's agile mind engaging the questions surrounding the topic: How do we get the ideas we have? What do we do, and fail to do, about actually getting the lives we want? Is it possible to actually want (and enjoy) one's life, rather than merely enduring it—especially in a culture that insistently promotes this ideal and makes it difficult for so many people?
Slipping between sources literary and psychoanalytic and back again, Phillips, with his “mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers” (The Washington Post), guides us through an existential tangle packaged in the context of the current moment, to explore a perennial question.
Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Attention Seeking, On Wanting to Change, On Getting Better, and On Giving Up. He is also the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.